Ayaan Hirsi Ali an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia...has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where she settled in 1992 after she deplaned in Frankfurt, supposedly en route to Canada for a marriage, arranged by her father, to a cousin. She makes her own arrangements.

She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, "Submission," an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband's duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.

It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil" who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam."

The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.

Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country's 16 million residents are Muslims, and the political left has appropriated the European right's traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.

Her story is told in a riveting new book, "Murder in Amsterdam," by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her -- this "Enlightenment fundamentalist" -- somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.

...this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam's worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European "dish cities" -- enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind -- many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.

She calls herself "a dissident of Islam" because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much." She says she is not "a militant atheist," but the emphasis is on the adjective.

She is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers -- John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies." Islamic extremists -- the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons -- will be enraged. She is unperturbed.

Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly.

Dr Koenraad Elst, one of Belgiumâs best orientalists and an occasional contributor to this website (if I had time I would translate more of his Dutch-language contributions into English), told me last week that he thinks âIslam is in decline, despite its impressive demographic and military surgeâ â which according to Dr Elst is merely a âlast
upheaval.â
He acknowledges, however, that this decline can take some time (at least in terms of the individual human life span) and that it is possible that Islam will succeed in becoming the majority religion in Europe before collapsing.

Click to expand...

According to the article, the reaction of some to the Pope's lecture, as well as the Danish cartoon, bear all the hallmarks of a religion struggling to cope with the 'modern' world.

I agree, she certainly has more moral courage in her little finger, than some of our so called leaders have in their entire anatomy.

I salute her.

Click to expand...

FFS Warrior Peot she had to move to the US because it transpired that she lied her way through the immigration process and therefore should not have been granted Ayslum in the first place. (IIRC the dutch withdrew her citizenship)

You may salute for being anti-islamic but in the same breath you would slag her off up an illigal immigrant who should be returned to own country....(SOMALIA IIRC )